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This page aims to collect and present concise definitions of the terms used in communication within the Wikimedia movement. Links are fine, but shouldn't replace a proper plain English explanation of the terms.

Please note that this collection is to be focused on the meta-level rather than project-level, so terms used exclusively at Wikipedia should not be placed here. See below for links to project glossaries, of which two of the largest are the MediaWiki glossary and the Wikipedia glossary.

also admin - someone with administrative rights on a wiki, which includes the rights to delete pages and block other users. Standards for being given admin rights vary widely across projects. Also sometimes called sysops, janitors, bibliotecarios, moderator, etc.

the "babel template", which is used across Wikimedia projects for users to indicate what languages they speak. To use it, place {{babel|en-N|es-1}} on your user page, replacing the language codes and numbers as appropriate -- N means native speaker/mother tongue, while 1 is minimal knowledge.

a backed-up list of to-do items that need to be dealt with on a wiki. For instance, most wikis have a cleanup backlog, with a long list of pages that need to be cleaned up in some way. Backups often suffer from not having enough editors working on them.

Bikeshedding

The phenomenon whereby technologically simple proposals will result in substantial feedback and iteration while more complex proposals will result in little or no feedback. See http://bikeshed.com/

Blacklist

Board of Trustees

All incorporated entities have Boards; the term Board of Trustees or just Board often refers to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, a partially community-elected, partially-appointed body of 10 volunteers who are responsible for governance and oversight of the WMF.

Boldness

as referenced in the Wikipedia principle "be bold!", refers to the wiki principle of: you have the edit button, so use it boldly!

Bot

short for "robot", a script that makes repetitious automated edits according to a preset algorithm. There are thousands of bots operating on the Wikimedia projects; see bot.

Bug wrangler

Person responsible for sorting and solving bug reports in Phabricator.

The people working on a particular wiki. Within Wikimedia, often used to refer to Wikimedia project editors in general, as in "the community", or to the subset that works on a particular project: "the Wikibooks community". There is little consensus about who exactly is a part of the community (though if you participate in some way on the projects you're probably part of it, and if you self-identify as a community member you definitely are), but the term often is used to mean those editors who share a sense of ownership in a particular site and participate in a sustained way on it, including working on policies, behind-the-scenes tasks, etc.: work that is not necessarily visible to casual readers or editors. Also refers to having a sense of "community": that is, sharing common values and working towards similar goals in a common way.

Consensus

An elusive term, referring to the principle of making decisions by a mechanism of discussion and proposal revision that results in consensus among the parties participating in the discussion (as opposed to other decision making mechanisms, such as voting or top-down decrees). Consensus-building values reasoned arguments, inclusiveness and building compromise, and is a time-intensive process. It co-exists in the wiki world with the principle of "being bold."

a two-letter code used to refer to a country, often used when identifying national level chapters. Wikipedias are named after language codes, which are a distinct two or three letter code (though sometimes the same as that used to refer to a country).

Creative Commons

Refers to either the Creative Commons free licenses, which all of the Wikimedia wikis use; or to the organization that develops the licenses.

Can mean a lot of different things (citation). Besides "what software developers do", it is a common term in non-profit fundraising, and as such is used by WMF's Foundations and Major Gifts team. WMF has had "Global Development", "Engineering and Product Development", and "Community Development" teams in the past.

Diff

The difference between one revision of a wiki page and another. Diffs are viewable from the edit history of a page.

Disambiguation

Differentiating between similarly-named items; often 'disambiguation page', which is a wiki page that disambiguates between similar terms, such as a Wikipedia article about several people that share the same name.

Double redirect

A page that redirects to a second page that in turn redirects to a third page. Double redirects do not work -- the redirect mechanism only works if it's one step -- so these should be fixed by changing the first redirect page to point to the ultimate destination (the third page).

When two people try to edit the same portion of the same wiki page at the same time; this results in a conflict where only one person can save their revision and the second person gets a notice that there is a conflict. With sections and improvements in the software these are less common than they used to be.

Editor

someone who edits a wiki (regardless of the type of edit they make). There are no hard and fast standards for what makes someone "an editor", beyond making an edit somewhere, but the term is often used to mean people who are part of that wiki's community.

a brief summary of an edit that is entered in the box at the bottom of the edit window; meant to explain to other readers/editors what the edit is all about. Edit summaries show up in recent changes, the page history, and the list of an individual editor's contributions.

edit war

a back-and-forth dispute between two or more editors, each revising the page as they see fit and reverting the other's edits. Led to the "three-revert rule" on the English Wikipedia. Edit warring is considered bad form; those involved are supposed to take it to the talk page and battle it out in discussion.

manually transforming data (often language or images) into a form understandable by computers. At WMF "hand coding" often refers to manually examining edits to wiki pages to evaluate their quality for research and analytics.

a way software can affect the behavior of other software, for example the 'EditFilter' hook allows extensions to check for spam and vandalism. Usually refers to PHP code, but there is also mediaWiki.hook for JavaScript.

the short (two or three character) ISO codes that are used to identify languages, used in Wikimedia to identify language editions of the projects. For example, "en" is English, "es" is Spanish (Español), etc.

Annotations to text that change its behavior and appearance. Click [Edit] on this page to see its wikitext markup, which the MediaWiki software turns into HyperText Markup Language, the native format of web pages.

the Wikimedia chapter which has signed a chapter agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation. This term is used to differentiate between chapter in forming and established entities, endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Public domain, set of works whose intellectual property rights have expired, been forfeited, or are inapplicable.

Performance

Permalink

A permanent link to a particular revision of a wiki page, which can be accessed by 1) clicking "permanent link" under the 'toolbox' in the default MediaWiki skin; 2) from the page history, clicking on the date/time link of the revision you want. This is very useful for providing attribution.

a form of organized activity undertaken by WMF, a chapter or members of the community (e.g. Wikiprojects). This term is often used to reference Wikimedia projects (i.e. the wikis: Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc.), although it actually has a much broader meaning.

Project namespace

A namespace that refers to the wiki itself, typically used to collect policies, guidelines, and help pages specific to that wiki. Examples include "Wikipedia:" on the English Wikipedia and "Meta:" on this wiki. On a MediaWiki-based wiki, this namespace can be referred to by using the prefix "Project:".

Proxy

Pseudo-namespace

A prefix used in a wikilink that does not correspond to a real namespace on the wiki. This is often used to refer to a real namespace (especially the "Project" namespace) in a shortened form — for example, "WP:" on the English Wikipedia. Sometimes (as with the previous example) the pseudo-namespace is promoted to an official alias of the true namespace; in other cases (such as "MOS:" on the English Wikipedia), the correspondence is accomplished by using redirects.

A link (Special:Random) that displays in the left-hand sidebar in the default MediaWiki skin, that takes you to any main-namespace page on the wiki.

RC

Abbreviation for Recent Changes

Recent changes

A list of all of the edits that are happening, in real time, on the wiki. Accessible via Special:RecentChanges or via a link in the left-hand sidebar in the default MediaWiki skin. Less useful on very large and busy wikis than it is on smaller wikis. The Special:RecentChanges page can be customized with links to subsets of changes, for instance all changes by IPs or all new pages.

Redirect

a wiki page that only points to another wiki page, or "redirects" there; these are often used in wiki projects to direct readers from synonyms, alternate spellings, etc. to the proper article. The code to create a redirect is #REDIRECT [[page name]]. To redirect Page A to Page B therefore, you would edit Page A and just place #REDIRECT [[Page B]] in the edit window for Page A then save the page. Redirects are not counted in the official article count of a project.

Red link

a wiki page that doesn't exist yet but is linked to from another wiki page; these wikilinks to blank pages are shown in the default skin as red text. Clicking on a red link takes you to a place to create the page.

An area of the wiki, usually a specific wiki page, where users are encouraged to make test edits; usually the sandbox is used for learning or experimenting with formatting and is regularly cleared out (by blanking the page).

the Wikimedia Foundation's office in San Francisco, or the staff and contractors working out of that office.

Shell

Shortcut

A code set up to abbreviate a particular namespace so that "shortcut code" pages can be created. For instance, on Wikipedia, there is a shortcut WP for the Wikipedia namespace, which can lead to pages like WP:MOS (which is a redirect to Wikipedia:Manual of Style). Handy for saving typing and remembering the location of commonly-used procedure pages, but also a source of much insider jargon in discussion, which is a perennial source of irritation for those who don't know the codes.

a collection of code and settings that affects the appearance and behavior of a MediaWiki installation. MediaWiki's default skin is called Vector, you can preview and choose another in Preferences > Appearance.

Sockpuppet

Spam

Spam-bot

special pages

A collection of MediaWiki pages that serve various functions, all prefixed by "Special". These pages reflect tools that are a part of the MediaWiki code and can't typically be edited or modified. For instance, Special:Statistics counts how many pages and users are on the wiki. A link to the list of special pages can be found under "toolbox".

Speedy

Usually used to refer to "speedy deletion", which means deleting a page without referring to the usual deletion procedures on the wiki. For instance, pages that are strictly spam with no redeeming content are often speedily deleted.

An Administrator who has been empowered to change any user's status on any Wikimedia Foundation project, including granting and revoking Administrator status and granting bureaucrat status. Stewards are elected on Meta.

Depending on the context, this can refer to the Editors of the content projects, a volunteer contributor to the MediaWiki software, the active members of the Wikimedia Chapters, or any combination. Volunteers are unpaid, but can have an official function within the organizations (board member, etc.).

A Wikimedia project focused on building a free knowledge base. Along with Wikisource, the newest Wikimedia project.

Wikidata

A Wikimedia project developed by Wikimedia Deutschland, which focuses on collecting and building a repository of data about the world, including interwiki language links between Wikipedia entries. There is only one Wikidata site, which is multilingual. With WikiVoyage, the newest Wikimedia project.

WikiDOM

WikiEditor

Wikify

To apply appropriate wiki markup to a page, such as linking terms or changing a manually numbered list into an automatically formatted one. Sometimes also used to refer to changes that enforce specific wiki policies or guidelines.

wikilink

A link from one page to another on the same wiki, accomplished by surrounding the page name by double square brackets, [[like this]]. This is also sometimes known as an internal link to distinguish it from an external link to a page on a different wiki or a non-wiki. A link to a page on another wiki is also called an interwiki link.

a public photo competition with each year a different theme, organized by Wikimedia chapters, groups and local Wikipedia volunteers in and around Africa. The public takes photos of the theme, upload those to Wikimedia Commons, and then they can be used in Wikipedia and elsewhere. The goal of the contest is to document the African culture for the world wide public.

a public photo competition around natural heritage, organized by Wikimedia chapters, groups and local Wikipedia volunteers. The public takes photos of nature, upload those to Wikimedia Commons, and then they can be used in Wikipedia and elsewhere. The goal of the contest is to make the worlds natural heritage visible for the world wide public.

a public photo competition around cultural heritage monuments, organized by Wikimedia chapters, groups and local Wikipedia volunteers. The public takes photos of monuments, upload those to Wikimedia Commons, and then they can be used in Wikipedia and elsewhere. The goal of the contest is to make the worlds heritage in cultural heritage monuments visible for the world wide public.

A corporation dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of free content created within Wikimedia projects. A Wikimedia chapter supports Wikimedia Foundation on a specific geographic (usually national) level.

An international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of Wikimedia projects to the public free of charge.

A two-part Wikimedia project aimed at helping volunteers get involved in Wikimedia operations and MediaWiki related software development. The first part of this project is Test/Dev Labs, and the second part is Tool Labs.

Incorporated independent non-profits representing the Wikimedia movement and supporting work focused on a specific theme, topic, subject or issue within or across countries and regions. Thematic or focused organizations use a name clearly linking them to Wikimedia and are granted use of Wikimedia trademarks for their work, publicity and fundraising.

Open membership groups with an established contact person and history of projects, designed to be easy to form. User groups may or may not choose to incorporate and are granted limited use of the Wikimedia trademarks for publicity related to events and projects.

An abbreviation for Wikipedia (often, but not always, the English one). When used in the English Wikipedia, this is a "pseudo-namespace" prefix for a policy, guideline, or essay. If a user suggests that you read/follow/avoid WP:XYZ (where XYZ is any string of characters) without linking the reference to the appropriate page, just copy WP:XYZ into the search window to see what it corresponds to. When used on other wikis, you may need to go to the English Wikipedia to search for it.